At Santiago’s table: an interview with Costa Rican chef Santiago Fernández Benedetto

Can you tell us about your restaurant, Silvestre?

My partners and I opened Silvestre in July 2017 after months of trying to figure out the most convenient venue to establish a newly conceived business idea that we thought was kind of bold. Our plan was to create a new Costa Rican cuisine, inspired by our culture and our heritage. We also wanted it to be free enough to allow us to play with any modern culinary technique feasible, and we wanted to always favour what’s pure and local.

This was not being tried fully by any other chef at the time. My approach, which my partners (siblings who I previously worked with for seven years at their restaurant in La Fortuna) supported and encouraged, was slightly audacious in the sense that it was a big experiment. But I knew it was inevitable. The development of our gastronomy would be determined by the huge amount of ingredients, known or untamed, present in our wilderness and on our farms.

In 2016, I had just returned from six years of valuable lessons with a few talented chefs in Sydney, Australia. Being around so many chefs from around the world made me yearn for the authenticity of my own country’s cuisine, and I felt I could play a part in making it prosper and shine.

How did you get into cooking ?

At 14, I was making my own candy recipes and selling them at school; at 16, after a conversation with my mother, she called chef Claudio Dubuis, the owner of Le Chandelier, one of San José’s most important restaurants back then. In a matter of days, I was working in his kitchen and thinking to myself that I was in the right place.

How have you made sustainability a focus in your restaurant?

Through thinking as if we were in a crisis while enjoying abundance! That is the core value of our kitchen.

What can visitors expect from a visit to Silvestre?

An authentic and refreshing travesty of Costa Rican flavours presented with nuances, allegory, nostalgia, folklore and playfulness. We are always loyal to the values of our country, respect for the environment, admiration for the ones who preceded us and love for what identifies us as Ticos.

Is there one thing about Costa Rican gastronomy that you think may surprise visitors?

The freshness and high quality found in local ingredients.

What does sustainable travel mean to you?

For me, sustainable travel is being aware of one’s impact as a traveller. It is undeniable that every traveller can potentially produce a positive impact just as easily as they can enable harm or cause damage to the places that they visit.

Unethical growth and overexploitation of resources to satisfy the demands of tourism are regularly contrasted against a population that is aware of the necessity for safeguarding their ecosystems. In Costa Rica, you’ll see communities that are interested in going one step further to fix their environmental issues for the sake of the travellers who visit them. There are examples of this in many parts of the country.